n8n workflow of the week · Episode 1 of 21 · useful
There are plenty of monitoring services. For a single website a four-node n8n workflow is often enough. The trick: it remembers the last state and only speaks up when it changes. No constant beeping, just “it is down” and “it is back”.
How it works
- Every 5 minutes: starts the workflow every five minutes.
- Check website: fetches the website. “Full response” and “Never error” make sure a 500 arrives as data rather than as a failure.
- Status changed?: compares with the last run. The state lives in
$getWorkflowStaticData, a small store per workflow. If the node returns nothing, the run ends quietly. - Push to phone: sends title and text to ntfy.sh; the app shows them as a push notification.
What it is good for
For your own website, a shop, a Nextcloud or the customer portal that “never” goes down. You find out before your customers do, and afterwards you know how long it lasted.
Make it yours
Several addresses? Duplicate the HTTP node or read the URL from a list in the Code node. Instead of ntfy, a Telegram, Slack or e-mail node works too. If you also want to report slow answers, measure the time between two timestamps in the Code node.
Import it in two minutes
- Download the workflow: week-01.json.
- In n8n, top right “…” → “Import from File”.
- In every push node replace
your-secret-topicwith your own hard-to-guess topic and subscribe to it in the ntfy app (free, no account). - Adjust the values marked with a comment in the Code node, press “Execute workflow” once, then activate it.
New to n8n? The basics are in n8n introduced.
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